The Favored Daughter by Fawzia Koofi Page A

living in my brother’s apartment in Makrorian. (The word makrorian roughly translates as “living space.”) The apartments had been built by the Russians using the latest technological advances, such as a communal hot water system serving over ten apartment blocks, each housing up to 50 apartments. Despite being shelled countless times, many of the Makrorian blocks have survived even today, and the hot water system even still works. Today it is still a sought-after neighborhood.
    During this time, Kabul was divided into different sectors. The central parts, Khair Khana, Makrorian, and around the King’s Palace, were controlled by the mujahideen government, which was then headed by President Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former general from Badakhshan and a man my family knew well—hence my brother’s senior position at the Interior Ministry. The famous “lion of the Panjshir,” Ahmed Shah Massoud, was his minister of defense.
    The west of Kabul was controlled by a man named Mazary, the leader of an ethnic group called the Hazaras. (Said to be the direct descendants of Genghis Khan, the Hazaras are identifiable by their classic Mongol looks, round faces and large almond-shaped eyes. They are unusual in being Shia Muslims; the majority of Muslim ethnic groups in the country are Sunni.) An area on the outskirts of Kabul, Paghman, was controlled by a man named Sayyaf and his people. Yet another area was controlled by the fearsome Abdul Rashid Dostum, the leader of the ethnic Uzbeks. Just outside the city walls, towards the south, was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of a group called Hizbi Islami; a second Hizbi Islami leader, Abdul Sabur Farid Kohistani, was the prime minister.
    Essentially, despite having a shared government and having been allies when fighting the Russians (during which time they were given the name “Northern Alliance,” as most of them originated from the north of Afghanistan), these commanders were now fighting each other for power. As the civil war grew more brutal, short-term allegiances shifted and changed with the weather.
    The fiercest opponent of the mujahideen government was Hekmatyar, who was unhappy with his role in the government and wanted more power and seniority. Every day, his men fired scores of rockets into Kabul from their base in the higher ground at the edge of the city. The rockets exploded in marketplaces, schools, hospitals, and gardens, and scores of people were killed or injured. Sometimes the situation changed overnight. A group that had previously supported the government might suddenly turn against it and start fighting. A few days later, with hundreds of civilians dead, the group might use the national TV station to announce it had all been a misunderstanding and it was now supporting the shared government again. The public had no idea what would happen from one day to the next. Probably our leaders didn’t either.
    Despite the turmoil happening around me, I insisted on resuming my English lessons. They were too important to me to give up, even though that meant regular journeys through the streets, which was now the battleground for the mujahideen commanders to play out their deadly power struggle.
    It should have been a simple, short taxi ride to class, except the journey to my lessons took me through some of the areas of the fiercest fighting. Some neighborhoods and streets had to be avoided entirely, while others had to be crossed whatever the risk. I would take a convoluted route that changed depending on which side held the upper hand. Gathering intelligence from people on the street was as essential to successfully navigating the route as was the driver’s ever-present search for the scarce supplies of petrol. Packs of gunmen would roam the streets and the danger of snipers was constant—their choice of target indiscriminate. A crack from a rifle accompanied by the dull thump of the bullet would often send some poor soul toppling